HDU (47 page)

No.
 
Way.

THE SEXY
BATHROOM ROMP THAT ENDED LIAM AND AMANDA

NFL dancer Megan Mayer admits her role in the
Hollywood split

Pop Dinner

Monday, March 7

Remember the mystery woman who was the victim of
Amanda Nathan’s wrath outside a Chelsea restaurant in February? Well, Pop
Dinner has identified Amanda and Liam Brody’s sexy dinner guest that night as
23-year-old Megan Mayer.
 
The
raven-haired beauty is not just a former cheerleader for the St. Louis Rams
– she’s the former childhood bestie of little Miss Nathan.
 
Uh-oh!

Mayer spoke to Pop Dinner over the phone this
morning, explaining the details of how the tryst began.
 
While in town from Missouri, Mayer
claims that Nathan invited her to dinner as a means to “show off her new
boyfriend.”
 
Unfortunately for poor
Amanda, her plan backfired when she took a phone call outside and her new
boyfriend followed the stunning Megan into the bathroom.

“We started fooling around in the booth,” Mayer
admitted.
 
“He was flirting with me
all night – giving me the eye, playing footsies.
 
When she [Nathan] left the table, he
told me right away that he wasn’t sure he could resist me.
 
I reminded him that he was dating my
friend, and he responded by saying that their relationship totally fizzled
since she moved to New York, because she was becoming needy and completely
insane from being so self-conscious of her looks.”

Yikes.
 
Seems
Liam was tired of poor Amanda’s crippling insecurity and needed a break! Looks
like he finally got one from the ravishing Miss Mayer! “He said he needed to feel
a woman again, and I gave in to the temptation.
 
I’m not proud of myself, but I maintain my belief that some
energies cannot be contained, and that night, his and mine connected and it
just couldn’t be helped.”

Though Mayer seemed truly regretful in her exclusive
interview, she did manage to tease a little info on Liam’s legendary
libido:
 
“He was an excellent
lover.
 
He had a lot of pent up
passion.”

The middle-aged clerk at the copy shop backed himself
up against the wall, behind a shelf and out of the way of any camera flashes
coming through the window.
 
Amanda
could only flash him an apologetic smile as she waited for the store’s old
printer to finish sputtering out her boarding pass.

A one-way ticket to Austin, Texas was only three hundred-fifty
dollars.
 
That was nothing
considering the thirteen hundred Amanda had just saved by calling off the
second month of her sublet, which she wouldn’t be fined for as long as she
moved out by the end of the week.
 
That wasn’t a problem – it was Thursday and her flight for Austin
departed in less than twenty-four hours.

All she needed to do in the meantime was finalize her
sublet of a bedroom in a charming house near Austin’s “SoCo” district, which
according to the many Craigslist ads she’d perused, was the place to be.
 
Not only that, it was half the cost of
her rent in New York – less than six hundred dollars for a month’s worth including
utilities – and her future roommates had described themselves as an “IT
guy” and a “grad student-slash-marathon runner,” which Amanda liked to
interpret as people who had better things to do than follow celebrity
gossip.
 
The sublet would be for
two months with the option to extend, which she would probably make use of.
 
Her plan was to tell her parents about
the move last minute, around the time of her flight so they didn’t try to
convince her to go home to Merit.

She had simply reached her tipping point with Megan’s
story.

Liam had probably shrugged it off as he’d done in the
past, especially with the distraction of his big film shoot in Nebraska.
 
But Amanda was without the same
luxury.
 
The rumor was her parting
legacy, how New York would last remember her – as the insecure mess
unable to function as a girlfriend, thanks to all those physical shortcomings.

Worse, the allegations added more fuel than ever to
the tabloid fire, and while they were previously bothersome, the paparazzi had
become flat-out frightening by Tuesday, the day after the story broke.
 
Jeering and hollering, they quickly
truncated Amanda’s job searches around the neighborhood, creating such
commotion that managers quickly asked her to leave and take them with her.
 
They were growing physical with their
harassment, more aggressive as they sensed her impending breakdown – or
at the very least a good, public tantrum.
 
They knew just how alone Amanda was, how without allies she’d become,
and they took it as their opportunity to walk closer, to make lewd jokes, to
let her feel their breath or spit as they shouted questions in her ear.

“Oopsie-daisy!”

As Amanda headed towards the post office to overnight
her sublet paperwork, a smug-faced paparazzo stuck his foot out to trip her,
exclaiming something or another to startle her while positioning his camera for
the money shot.
 
She grumbled with
revulsion as she hopped over the man’s shoe, kicking herself free as he gave a
last try at tangling his foot between her ankles.
 
And we’ve come to
this.
 
Simple headlines
outlining her fall from grace were no longer sufficient – they needed a
literal picture to go with it.
 
Either that or a shot of her kicking and screaming, though obviously both
would be preferable.
 
They were
hell-bent – to the point where the smug-faced cameraman dared to try
again, sticking his foot between Amanda’s legs as she walked.

“
Don’t
do
that,” she practically growled, though she was sure to keep her face straight
and her voice low, just audible enough for the man to hear her.
 
Her command only seemed to excite him.

“Miss
Feisty
,
then! Hey, what do you think Megan meant about Liam needing a ‘real’ woman,
huh? What are you missing?” His foot reached out for the space between her legs
again.
 
Amanda froze in the middle
of the sidewalk as she pressed her feet and calves together.
 
Though her instinct was to kick the man
repeatedly and pummel him with her purse, she instead clenched her jaw and
stuck a hand in the air, hailing a cab to take her the rest of the way to the
post office – a mere three blocks.

Keeping the meter running, Amanda took the same cab
straight home.
 
She wasn’t even
sure why she thought she could walk – the same horde of immobilizing
paparazzi had followed her on Wednesday, when she had gone to complete a money
transfer at the bank.
 
They weren’t
as bad that day, but she figured that with every twenty-four hours that passed
without a meltdown, they schemed up better ways to be infuriating and
intrusive.
 
It couldn’t be too hard
as a pack of grown men with rolling HD cameras, chasing an unaccompanied girl
around a city she still didn’t know very well.

Click.
 
Clack
.
 
Pebbles bounced off Amanda’s second floor window.
 
The paparazzi, still.
 
They were trying to get her to
investigate, to pull up the shades.
 
She rolled her eyes.
 
She
was an easy target but not a stupid one.
 
Rather than fall for their elementary ploy, Amanda distracted herself by
packing the last thing she’d left out of her suitcase: her laptop – the compact
source of all her fame and recognition.
 
Tucking it away in her suitcase felt so final that a knot formed in her
throat.

But she was officially through – alone, jobless
and rendered unemployable by the paparazzi.
 
With nothing else going on, the daily battles against them would
become her entire life in New York.
 
The last thing she wanted was to ruin her lasting memory of the city
she’d come to truly love.
 
For
salvaging the pitiful remains of her confidence, it held a special place in her
heart.
 
The thought of someday
moving back to enjoy it under better circumstances was all that comforted her.

Someday
.
 
Amanda sighed as she finished wiping
down the fridge, trying to ignore the persisting
click, clack
against her window.
 
The tinny sound was beginning to gnaw at her, but she
refrained from spewing a profanity-laced tirade out the window since it was
exactly what they wanted.

Instead, she held it in and tried to swallow the fact
that the paparazzi had defeated her, running her out of town
and
ruining her final night of peace in
the city.

But she couldn’t.

Kneeling back on the ground, she unzipped her
suitcase and took her laptop back out.

BLOG #3:
THIS IS TEMPORARY. I’LL BE BACK.

Thursday, March 10th

11:31PM

Posted by Amanda Nathan

That was the explanation I clicked on when I deactivated Facebook.

I haven’t gone back yet, but I probably will when I’m all settled
in my new city with a new job and new pictures that I’ll be proud of sharing
with the fourteen friends I trust not to leak my updates to Pop Dinner, so they
can run a story about how I’ve put on a whole bunch of weight (which I intend
on doing to some degree, because my new city is hint: known for barbecue.
 
But you know, five pounds tops, because
I don’t want to have to buy new clothes).

Yes, I’m leaving New York.
 
But like I told Mark Zuckerberg, I’ll be back.
 
I left Facebook a few months ago to be a
little less accessible to the media, and I’m leaving the city now for pretty
similar reasons.
 
I miss that whole
privacy thing, and oddly, not because I feel bloaty and don’t want my photo on
magazines, as I’ve mostly jumped that hurdle of insecurity.
 
These days, I miss privacy because I’ve
learned that not bringing a crowd of loud, strange men everywhere you go is
necessary to getting hired for a job, which is something I’m interested in
because I’d like to make myself somewhat useful and perhaps earn money to
afford things.
 
But really, half
the reason I came to New York (a guy named Liam yes, being the other half) was to
at the very least find a job and hopefully while doing that, discover what I’m
actually good at.
 
Like a cliché, I
found out that I liked writing, though admittedly, I might like it mostly
because some people have told me that I’m good at it.
 
It’s like in middle school, when you start to like someone
just because you heard they liked you and hey, why not? It could work out.

But alas, I’m unemployed.
 
And not to be a tattletale, but I was interviewing for a receptionist
position at a cute little spa in the East Village on Wednesday, and I got totally
job-blocked by the paparazzi! They were taking pictures of me through the
window, which understandably upset the customers, which in turn upset the owner,
who in turn kicked me out for attracting a bunch of weirdos with cameras to his
business.

So, indeed, I’m out – for now.
 
But I’ll be back at some point – whenever I can get
hired to a job where the paparazzi won’t get me canned before I even don a
uniform.
 
And while some of you may
know me now as “famous for doing nothing,” the next time you see me, I promise
I will have done something good and respectable with my life.

The 6AM sun cast an orangey hue on all the buildings
that Amanda had never seen before, and the streets were empty aside from deli
owners hosing down the sidewalks.
 
She
was finally awake for the hour at which the city was completely peaceful and
quiet.
 
I
would
discover this about
the city on my last day
, she thought with dismay as she stared out the car
en route to the airport.
 
For a
split second, Amanda wondered if she could somehow book a later flight and
allow herself the time for a stroll down the street.
 
It had never looked so
stroll-able
before.

Stop
, she
scolded herself.
 
She’d already
woken up missing the city despite still being in it.
 
It didn’t help that she’d absentmindedly packed all her
clothing away without leaving out an outfit to wear to the airport.
 
Sticking her hand in her suitcase to
feel for anything stretchy and comfortable, she ended up pulling out a pair of
leggings along with something long and soft and made of cashmere – Liam’s
black sweater.
 
The one that he had
given her off his back for their first date at Lilac.
 
She hadn’t realized she still had it.
 
But not wanting to dig through her
clothes, which she’d stuffed tangled and unfolded into her suitcase, Amanda
wore the sweater, hating herself for luxuriating in it, pulling the sleeves up
over her hands and rubbing her cheek against her shoulder to feel its buttery, smooth
fabric.